The Soviet Mineralogist Who Spent His Life on Tunguska and Died in a German POW Camp in 1942

Leonid Alekseyevich Kulik (1883–1942) was a Soviet mineralogist on the staff of the Russian Academy of Sciences Mineralogical Museum at Leningrad. He had been trained at Kazan University, had served as a military meteorologist in the First World War, and had joined the Academy of Sciences in 1921 under the mentorship of the senior geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. His specialism was meteoritic mineralogy.

He was 44 when he organised the first scientific expedition to the 1908 Tunguska blast site in 1927. He returned to the site four more times — in 1928, 1929, 1937, and 1939 — and was preparing a sixth expedition in summer 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

What the expeditions found

Kulik’s 1927 reconnaissance was the first scientific entry into the central Tunguska blast zone in the nineteen years since the event. He found approximately 2,150 square kilometres of flattened forest in the characteristic radial pattern that has defined the modern understanding of the airburst geometry. He spent four months mapping the surrounding terrain, interviewing the surviving Evenki indigenous witnesses, and searching for what he expected to be the main impact crater.

He found no crater. The substantial central area of the blast zone was a flat depression rather than a hole; the trees at the geometric centre were standing upright (substantially the signature of an overhead airburst rather than a ground impact); there was no recovered meteoritic mass at any point in the searched area.

His subsequent 1928, 1929, 1937, and 1939 expeditions extended the mapping and conducted progressively deeper test excavations at various candidate impact-crater sites. None of them produced any recovered meteoritic mass. The absence of any recovered solid material from the event is itself the Kulik-era contribution to the modern interpretation of Tunguska as an airburst phenomenon.

The war

Kulik volunteered for the People’s Militia at Leningrad in July 1941 at age 58. He was sent west with the militia formations that were deployed to the defensive perimeter around Moscow. He was caught in the catastrophic German encirclement at Vyazma in October 1941 — one of approximately 700,000 Soviet soldiers captured in the operation — and was held first at a forward Wehrmacht camp and then at the German POW transit camp at Spas-Demensk in the Smolensk Oblast.

He had been wounded at Vyazma — accounts vary between a leg wound and a chest wound — and his physical condition deteriorated through the winter. The German camp medical facilities were negligible for Soviet POWs; the winter typhus epidemic that swept the eastern POW camps in early 1942 killed approximately 60% of the captured Soviet soldiers held at Spas-Demensk through that winter.

Kulik died at the Spas-Demensk camp in April 1942 of typhus complications. He was 58. His body was buried in the camp common pit; the specific location is unknown.

The sixth expedition

The sixth Tunguska expedition Kulik had been preparing in summer 1941 was abandoned and was not resumed until 1958, when a successor generation of Soviet scientists (most prominently Konstantin Florensky) returned to the site under the post-Stalinist Academy of Sciences programme. The subsequent Russian Tunguska research tradition — including the 21st-century engagement with the contested Lake Cheko interpretation — substantively traces its institutional descent through Kulik.

The 1927 photographs Kulik took at the Tunguska site remain the principal photographic record of the blast zone’s appearance in the pre-Second-World-War period. Many of the original Kulik field notebooks survive in the Leningrad (St Petersburg) Mineralogical Museum archive; 21st-century Russian and international research projects have re-examined them for evidence the original Kulik-era teams may have missed.

He is commemorated by a small monument at the principal entry to the Tunguska reserve and by a crater on the moon.